It was impossible to lie to himself now. He needed the words. He needed to hear it.
Bertie’s voice had softened, but his next words still landed with the force of a blow. “Your father may have believed that a man is made by tearing down others, but he was wrong. His hardness was not strength. It was brittleness. It was fragility.”
“I know,” Arthur said shakily. “I have learned that from—from the two of you.”
From Bertie and Huw he had learned the kind of manhood that he believed in: gentle and steadfast, loving and loyal. They were the pattern upon which he had tried to mold himself, the kind of person he wanted to become.
Arthur watched the black ink grow blurred on the papers in front of him. He tried to steady his voice before he spoke. “I did not mean to let you down. I am sorry that I’ve made you feel as though you were no more than employees to me. You’ve always been more than that. From the very first.”
“Then stop acting as though you do not have a family,” Bertie murmured. “Because you do.”
Bertie’s words pressed down upon him, scoring themselves along his skin. What had he told Bertie, all those weeks ago, when Lydia had first come to Strathrannoch Castle?
That he did not need love or family. That he did not want those things.
Because he had been afraid. Because wanting was dangerous.
Because he had wanted more from his father—and from Davis—and been hurt. Because it was easier to pretend that loneliness was contentment. That safety was indistinguishable from fear.
And yet all this time he had not been alone. Hehada family. He had Bertie—and Huw—and Fern and Rupert, and he loved them, andhowhad he gotten so turned around as to deny what they meant to him?
How had he come to be here, surrounded by helpless words and afraid to tell the truth to the people he loved?
He looked up, into Bertie’s open face. There was safety there, and care, and the steadfast devotion of family. He had been a fool to try to pretend he did not want those things.
“I need help,” he choked out. “Please. I’ve—I’m trying to fix things, but I’ve bollocksed it all up, and I don’t know what to do.”
Bertie’s gaze fell to the papers on the desk and then he looked up, pressed his hands together, and nodded. “Of course,” he said calmly. “Tell me what’s happened.”
The words were so familiar—so bloody reassuring—that Arthur had to look down very hard at the desk for a moment or two before he could compose himself enough to speak.
“Lydia,” he managed. “I left her in London. Davis—he wasn’t the villain we’d thought, Bertie. None of it was true. And he wanted her too, had wanted her all along. I thought it would be better for her if she had the freedom to make her choice.”
His voice wobbled on the words. He felt the sheer idiocy of his actions yawning before him like a great cliff, off of which he had leapt without a second thought.
“Oh, fuck,” he said hoarsely. “I shouldn’t have left. I know I shouldn’t have. Only I was so goddamned afraid to ask her…”
“Ask her what?”
“To ask her to choose me.”
He did not know how he would survive if she said no.
Bertie was regarding him from across the desk, his face gone unreadable. When he spoke, he almost seemed not to have heard Arthur’s incoherent confession. “Did I ever tell you why Huw and I left London all those years ago?”
Arthur hesitated, uncertain. “You said ’twas easier for the two of you to be together somewhere far from the city.”
Bertie inclined his head. “Yes, that’s so. We left the place of my birth—the place where we met—because the father of one of our friends accused us of having led his son into iniquity and threatened to press charges against us for our relationship with each other.”
Arthur gritted his teeth. He knew—of course he knew—that things had never been easy for Bertie and Huw, but he hated how helpless he was in the face of it.
“We lost our community,” Bertie went on, “when we left London. Other men and women who loved as we did. Jamaican immigrants whose voices recalled to me my own parents. It was a great loss, a terrible loss—it took years for us to find a new home and begin to rebuild.”
He paused a moment, nostalgia and grief twined in the gentle planes of his face. And then he fixed his gaze upon Arthur. “But even that loss, great as it was, was worth it so that we need not be parted. I would have given up anything to remain with him. Even the world.”
The words were slow and featherlight, and they landed in Arthur’s heart and made themselves at home there.
He knew what Bertie meant, knew it like he knew the color of Lydia’s hair and the texture of her laugh.
